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Daily Archives: January 16, 2009

I really like my new Dell E4300 laptop but it has an odd behavior which is driving me nuts. When connected with either WiFi or BroadBand (I have the AT&T card) it will lose network connectivity after some period of time. Sometime is takes an hour or more, sometimes it happens very quickly. Once it happens, I am usually hosed and need to reboot. But not always. It only affects WiFi and BroadBand. It has no affect on the wired Ethernet connection. As long as I am in the office or at home I am ok.

I have been round and round with our internal IT people as well as Dell on this issue and haven’t found any resolution yet. A new BIOS update (A05) actually made the problem worse. With the A03 BIOS when it happened I could still ping other computers and eventually full connectivity would come back. But not now.

Reportedly Dell has a production stop on the E4300 to resolve a bunch of issues and a BIOS update is supposed to be available on January 19th. I hope so – I am about to spend a bunch of time on the road for work and having an unreliable network connection is not ok.

If you are considering an E4300 I’d hold off for now and see if reports improve over the next couple weeks. That is of course assuming that Dell actually delivers a new BIOS update and doesn’t delay it again!

I will we out of town for work for their February meeting so it looks like it will be in March which should give me sufficient time and motivation to finish up a lot of the unfinished work. I really need to get to work on a sample theme too – the theme I am currently using on the MacDolphins site is not widget ready which is a big limitation.